Nearly five decades after the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979, millions of women and girls worldwide still face discrimination, inequality, and violence. The persistence of these harms, despite binding international legal commitments, has prompted a direct call for parliaments to move beyond symbolic treaty adoption and into active enforcement on behalf of the citizens they serve.
On Wednesday, September 2, 2026, South Africa’s National Assembly Speaker, Ms Thoko Didiza, addressed this implementation gap during an Inter-Parliamentary Union webinar focused on parliamentary oversight of CEDAW. Her message was unambiguous: legislatures must use their power to scrutinize whether governments are actually delivering on the promises made to protect women and girls from discrimination.
The webinar brought together parliamentarians from IPU member countries to examine how legislative bodies can close the distance between international commitments and measurable improvements in women’s lives. The core problem, participants agreed, is straightforward. Adopting laws and signing international agreements accomplish little if they produce no tangible change for the people those instruments are meant to protect.
Parliaments hold three critical levers of power in this regard. Through legislative authority, they can create or strengthen laws. Through oversight, they can demand accountability from government. Through budget control, they can direct resources toward implementation. Webinar discussions emphasized that parliamentarians must actively use all three tools to assess government progress, identify where implementation is failing, examine national CEDAW reports, and follow up on recommendations that emerge from the formal reporting process.
A key insight from the webinar was that CEDAW reporting should not function as a bureaucratic obligation designed to satisfy international bodies. It is, rather, a critical accountability mechanism through which parliaments can measure whether commitments are translating into real improvements for women and girls. That reframing shifts the purpose of reporting from external compliance to internal democratic scrutiny, placing citizens at the center of the process.
For South Africa, the stakes are reinforced by the country’s own constitutional framework. The Constitution explicitly commits the nation to equality, human dignity, and freedom from discrimination. This creates a direct obligation for Parliament to ensure that legislation, public policy, government programmes, and public spending genuinely advance substantive equality and protect the rights of women and girls. The responsibility is not merely international; it is embedded in South Africa’s foundational law.
Meanwhile, the webinar served a secondary but important function. It created space for parliamentarians from different countries to share experiences and learn from one another’s approaches to monitoring CEDAW implementation, strengthening the collective capacity of legislatures to hold governments accountable.
Laws on the books mean little without parliamentary vigilance, government action, and adequate resources. The question now facing legislatures in South Africa and across IPU member countries is whether the accountability tools they already possess will be deployed with the consistency that women and girls have been waiting nearly fifty years to see.